Writing as a Thinking Practice
Writing is a powerful exercise in refining thought, unearthing new insights, and building clarity. As William Zinsser famously said in his On Writing Well classic:
Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other.
One sharpens the other as writing forces us to slow down and organize our thoughts in ways that speaking or thinking alone often cannot achieve.
At its best, clear writing transcends the personal and becomes universal by tapping into shared human experiences and emotions. I found many examples of clear writing this year, but two stood out for their brevity and quiet sorrow captured in just a few lines.
She had blue skin,
And so did he.
He kept it hid
And so did she.
They searched for blue
Their whole life through,
Then passed right by—
And never knew.
Shel Silverstein – Every Thing On It: Poems and Drawings
Josephine Tey offers a similar striking example:
They had both gone on to other things; to other people. Laura indeed had skipped from one person to the next one with the bright indifference of a child playing hop-scotch. And then he had taken her to that Old Boys’ dance. And she had met Tommy Rankin. And that had been that.
Josephine Tey – The Singing Sands
Writing is recursive. The process of drafting, revising, and refining transforms rough ideas into something precise and true. Like a prism, writing refracts thought, revealing new clarity with every revision.
As Zinsser also observed, the act of rewriting often reveals the moment a writer begins to sound like their authentic self:
Paragraph 1 is a disaster — a tissue of generalities that seem to have come out of a machine. No person could have written them. Paragraph 2 isn’t much better. But Paragraph 3 begins to have a somewhat human quality, and by Paragraph 4 you begin to sound like yourself. You’ve started to relax. It’s amazing how often an editor can throw away the first three or four paragraphs of an article, or even the first few pages, and start with the paragraph where the writer begins to sound like himself or herself.
William Zinsser – On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction
Just as a gardener tends to plants, nurturing them through seasons, writing thrives through constant pruning, with ideas sprouting and branching like a well-tended garden.
Writing as a Digital Garden
A digital garden is a living repository of knowledge: a personal collection of interconnected notes, essays, and reflections that grow organically over time. Personal wikis or similar tools serve as spaces where half-formed thoughts mature into a larger body of work. Over time, these small, interconnected notes create a living map of ideas.
In her superb essay The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web, Maggie Appleton expands on the digital garden concept by illustrating the contrasting layers of the internet. She introduces the metaphor of the “dark forest” to describe the public web as a quiet yet unsettling place haunted by predators such as advertisers, trolls, tracking bots, and clickbait creators. This commercialized and hostile environment increasingly overshadows and often disrupts genuine human interaction.
In response, many retreat to what Appleton calls the “cozy web,” smaller, private online spaces like digital gardens, personal websites, group chats, or niche communities. These intimate spaces foster genuine conversations, free from the pressures of algorithms and engagement metrics.
These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments.
Yancey Strickler – The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
Writing and thinking thrive in spaces where authenticity takes precedence over performance. Thoughts find room to grow, messy yet fertile, private yet universal, nurturing the writer and the reader in ways the noisy, commercialized public web with hyper-curated content rarely can.
Other Resources:
Maggie Appleton – A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
Maggie Appleton – The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web
Scott Hanselman’s conversation: What is AI’s UI? with Maggie Appleton
Shel Silverstein’s The Missing Piece Meets the Big O is a quiet but sharp metaphor about self-sufficiency wrapped in the softness of a children’s story. The essence of clear writing is accessible to all ages.
Previous Writing Insights articles can be found here.